This invention relates to apparatus for aerial refuelling, and in particular to apparatus for deploying a hose and drogue through an aperture in the airframe of an aircraft.
There is a requirement for deploying a refuelling hose and drogue through the floor of a tanker aircraft cabin. Items projecting through a cabin floor aperture must be retracted for aerodynamic and ground clearance reasons when not in use. It is therefore necessary to deploy the drogue and hose through the aperture in the cabin floor during flight. The deployed hose in flight will naturally lie at a shallow angle with the aircraft body. Therefore the passage of the drogue during deployment, and the line of the hose out of the aperture, must approximate to this shallow angle to prevent the hose scraping the edge of the aperture.
The floor of the aircraft has a finite structural depth, and the aperture has a limited length. In the past it has been proposed to guide the hose through the floor in a deployment tunnel. Prior attempts to put this into practice have involved moving a deployment tunnel into the floor aperture, and deploying the hose and drogue through the tunnel. However the angle of the tunnel tends to be too steep, such that this system cannot always accommodate the shallow hose angles required. This is because a change of hose angle at the exit of the deployment tunnel would cause the hose to bear against the edge thereof.
The present invention aims to provide a simple deployment system which allows the hose to lie at the correct angle without bearing against the edge of the aperture or the deployment apparatus. It aims to provide a system suitable for use with tanker aircraft which have a relatively short and deep aperture available in the cabin floor for deployment.